I'm not in a book club, but I highly appreciate your thoughts on books. Anna Karenina is in my top five best books ever. Leo Tolstoy can portray people in a manner that makes them very recognizable. Even though the names are challenging, I found that I knew which character was talking just by the dialogue and his description. He is a master writer. Anna Karenina's first line is one of the most famous openings to a novel in all of literature: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”